The most difficult aspect of the assignment was simply getting used to the ruby CGI class's syntax; it is not entirely intuitive that each html element would be represented as members of a CGI object, and that they take a "block" which resolves to a String. Once the syntax was clear, however, the structure did somewhat resemble the equivalent html syntax.

There were two main problems which greatly slowed down the solution to this project:

1. We could not log directly onto the betaweb account from our local machine, even if we were connected through the wireless netowrk, so if we were coding on our local machines, it was necessary after each change to FTP onto cycle1, the scp from cycle1 to betaweb, which took nearly ten times longer than if we could've worked directly on a test server and simply refresh the web page each time a change was made

2. I couldn't figure out how to display the cause of errors in the web page; whenever a Ruby syntax error occurred it claimed to write an error to a server log, but the server logs were not accessible. Thus, debugging involved some trial-and-error. Again, if we had a local test server this would've been much easier.